


Flickers of Salvation

by neuxue



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Gen, canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 09:11:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8885176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neuxue/pseuds/neuxue
Summary: "One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist." --Lord Asriel





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [grue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grue/gifts).



_We are the watchers, of consciousness, of fate, of reality and possibility, of what is and what may be. We watch as infinities collapse, as possibility springs full-formed into being and dies in a wingbeat or a choice, as worlds breathe and fade, as worlds collide._

_It begins, has always begun, will always begin, with a tangle of salvation. Of others, of each other, of existence entire._

* * *

 

She is not the first witch Lee Scoresby has seen; in his time as an arctic aëronaut, he has come to be not acquainted with but certainly aware of those whose skies he shares. She is not even the first he has spoken to. But she is the first to lash a tether to his balloon and pull him towards the pole and recruit him into an invisible and all reaching war that will be his salvation even as it is his damnation, though he cannot know this now.

All in all she troubles him, but Lee Scoresby has always had a soft spot for those who test his mastery of equilibrium.

All in all, he thinks he likes her.

*

Serafina Pekkala has not know many aëronauts, and had she met this man on solid ground, she would never have expected him to take so familiarly to the sky. His daemon is flightless, after all – but then, so too should he be, by all the laws of nature, and yet here he is. He speaks casually of giving up the skies, but the light in his eyes gives the lie to his words. She wonders if he can hear the lie in hers, when she says she would have been content to give up flying to be a gyptian boat-wife. It is always harder, she has learned, to detect a lie one is telling to oneself.

She once might have found it strange, a witch of the northern tundra feeling a kinship with a Texan mercenary, but she has heard whispers of change on the winds for years now, and as she looks at the sleeping girl, and the armoured bear, she thinks she can almost see the threads of fate binding them all together. Binding them all to that sleeping child, and the destiny of destiny itself. Beside that, very little feels strange.  

* * *

 

_Neither thinks of life-debt or rescue. They were saving the children, not each other. But she saved him then, when she told him of the war._

_She damned him._

_And saved him._

* * *

 

Then the witches come, and he marvels at how her calm poise becomes deadly in an instant. Lee has never been one to find beauty in killing; his pistol is a tool and he handles it as deftly as the cables and instruments of his balloon, but he has never found it beautiful.

So for an instant he stares transfixed as this young yet unfathomably old woman with a coronet of wildflowers in her hair and starlight in her eyes whirls into the ragged black tangle of fluttering death, unleashing arrow after arrow with the ice-cold precision of an arctic storm ** _._** He had never doubted that she knew how to use the bow slung over her shoulder, never doubted her skill or speed or strength. But before this airborn battle over the frozen Svalbard sea, he had not understood why some referred to battle as a dance.

*

For one seemingly reluctant to join in a greater war, the aëronaut proves as useful in a fight as Serafina could ever have hoped. His long pistol is a shock to her ears each time he fires, so loud against the quiet whoosh and nock of arrows, but somehow solid and dependable. He does not miss, even as the basket tosses and lurches in the winds. It does not have the grace or manoeuvrability of cloud-pine, yet he seems to evade his opponents without thought. A brush of his hands across one of his instruments, a slight tug on the gas-bag, and what should have been an ungainly bright target is as slippery and elusive as the wind itself.

Until one of her sisters falls. The line goes slack, and the basket of the balloon, barely held steady by the witches’ strength and the aëronaut’s skill, lurches wildly as balance fails.

The bear falls, and the boy, but she can do nothing for them now. The child will be safer with the bear, on the ground, than he would be with her in the air amongst the death-rain of arrows. As for the bear…he is an exile, she knows, condemned to death the moment he is seen. But she has also looked into his eyes, and seen the alien wisdom there. And Lyra, that fierce child of destiny and grace, is out there in the snows somewhere, and where that girl goes, possibility trembles.

But Lee Scoresby hangs by one hand from the basket of his balloon, still clutching his pistol in the other. His next shot goes wide of its mark, and the recoil almost shakes him loose. Her sisters cling to the draw-lines, trying to right the basket, but the wind has caught it now and it acts as a sail, lurching and jumping in the storm. And all the while arrows fly; Serafina Pekkala herself can only follow the aëronaut’s plight in glimpses, as she dives amongst the witches, amongst her sisters and her now-enemies, as Kaisa wheels above her, diving and snapping and beating at the other bird-daemons who have joined the fray.

She reaches him just as an enemy witch looses an arrow, grips his arm and pulls him upwards, and the arrow misses by the width of a snowflake. As she strains against the wind to drag him into the basket of the balloon, to pull the basket itself upright, his pistol goes off again with a deafening crack. A flood of relief rushes across her bond with Kaisa, and she knows without turning to look that he has saved her, even as she carries him to safety.

She opens her mouth to thank him, and he takes a breath as if to thank her, but the wind parts them and steals their words, flinging them in opposite directions, Serafina towards the fleeing enemy and Lee’s balloon into the eastern sky.

Not long after, the arctic night screams as the sky is filled with fog.

* * *

 

_As the winds fray into chaos, the possibilities unfold in bright effervescent flickerings, fledgling worlds not yet breathing, glimmering in the liminal space between existence and oblivion—_

_—swept away on the tide of fog as the sky is torn asunder. Drowned by a bridge paved with the souls of unborn worlds._

* * *

 

He looks strangely at home amongst the witches, his arctic hare daemon less an oddity and more a familiarity now that they are on solid ground. He is from Texas, she remembers, but the Arctic is his home. Perhaps there is witch blood somewhere in his ancestry, but there are too many wounds in witch-families for her to even consider asking. He may not recognise it as a breach of etiquette, but she would know, so she wonders in silence.

She is almost half tempted when he speaks of Grumman, of something in his possession or knowledge that may help Lyra. A weapon, perhaps, that could turn the tide of this oncoming war. But her bow and her quiver are the only weapons she will ever use, and she can feel the wind and the tundra and the stars pulling her inexorably towards the bridge in the sky. Towards Lyra herself. She has lived long enough to know better than to ignore the calls of fate.

*

He is almost half tempted when she gathers her sisters to fly towards the little girl, alone in that strange city in the sky. But if he knows her at all, she will have found allies there, or made them. And the notion of something that could aid her, even if it rests on as knife-edge slim a chance as finding a man who seems to have become just another Arctic legend, is not a call he can resist. He will find his way to her, and he will bring her more than his balloon and his love.

* * *

 

_Probability should flicker here, ghosts of choices unmade should fill the emptiness from which universes coalesce. But fate is drawn too closely to the child even now, tightening the threads and ensnaring possibilities before they can form. Destiny follows closely now behind the one who will be its undoing._

* * *

 

So she hands the aëronaut a flower, and though he thanks her in that same calm drawl with which she has always heard him speak, she can see in his eyes that he knows what a rare gift this is.

*

So he thanks the witch-queen for the flower and the wind, and finds the skies strangely lonely as the balloon takes flight once more.

* * *

 

_Here, the possibilities do scatter, small infinities branching into larger, worlds hanging on a single choice or moment. Endless possibilities unfolding, only to collapse in milliseconds as each step forward crushes unformed universes underfoot with less noise than the shifting of dry leaves beneath a one-time soldier’s boots or the wind against a snow-goose daemon’s wings._

_But in those milliseconds…_

* * *

 

—He awakens from the strange dreams that were not dreams at all, and when the shaman says one zeppelin escaped, he remembers another who can work spells and rain death from the sky. He presses the flower in his hands and calls to her – _Serafina Pekkala, come now, I need you_ – and watches the horizon. Watches the pursuing zeppelin as it suddenly tilts and shudders, as a ragged black shape silhouetted against the sky rises, loosing another arrow and another and another until one hits home and the falling zeppelin is wreathed in flames. _I cannot stay_ , she says, approaching the balloon long enough to circle once, _I must return to Lyra. Go well, Lee Scoresby._ The storm leaves with her, and Lee guides the wounded balloon down softly in the gentle winds. Grumman – Parry? –sets off on foot at once. Lee shoulders his rifle and follows him until they reach a hill and Grumman tells him _their camp is on the other side. Go around. I will meet you there._ There is a hoarseness to his voice and an urgency in his eyes that Lee cannot bring himself to gainsay, so he leaves the shaman and walks around the base of the hill, looking for Lyra. Instead, he finds tragedy. Witches, staring indifferent where they once stood guard. Witches, fallen from their cloud-pine boughs and broken on the rocks of a foreign world. In his shock, he sees too late one of the lingering spectral forms that doomed them. Too late, he reaches for Hester. And then he, too, stands unmoving, staring indifferently down at the fallen form of the witch who had all too briefly been his comrade-in-arms—

* * *

 

_The chance exists only for an instant, but in that instant we tremble._

* * *

 

—Hester remembers the flower as soon as she and Lee take up their position behind the boulder, preparing to make what they both know will be their last stand. Still, she pulls the flower gently from his pocket with her teeth, lays it beside his hand. Lee looks up at her and nods, understanding, and holds the flower in his hand for an instant before gripping his rifle and taking aim. Hester longs to search the skies, but all her focus is on the men in front of them, on the bullets that soon fill the air and the pain that all too quickly fills her awareness. She can feel herself beginning to fade even as she points out the last man – _shame to die with one bullet left_ – but as Lee spends that bullet to set the zeppelin aflame, she catches sight of something else. _The sky, Lee_ , she whispers. Dazed with pain, he looks up and they see her descending. So graceful, more beautiful than they remember, and smiling, smiling so kindly—

—She knows even before she reaches him that she has come too late. He is still alive, but she can sense that he has only moments, and she knows the limits of her skill. So instead she smiles, for Yambe-Akka is always smiling, and her visits are gifts of joy. Lee Scoresby is no witch, but times are changing and this is a strange world, and he is a worthy companion of the skies. She cannot save his life, but she can save him from dying in pain and alone. His daemon fades as she touches the ground, and she lingers long enough to press a gentle kiss to his forehead, close his eyes, and lay a simple keeping spell over his body, sealed with another bright-red flower from her crown. Then she leaps into the sky in grief and building rage, a cry tearing free as she returns to her sisters and sees what has befallen them. Too many times already she has had to take up Yambe-Akka’s mercy and smile, but she cannot leave her sisters to soulless indifference. So she takes out her knife and sheathes her pain long enough to smile, joyous and welcoming, as she delivers her sisters from a fate worse than death. Then she sets off in search of their murderer, anger coursing through her like marsh-fire. She is just in time to see the woman Coulter approach a window in the air, and lay down the sleeping form of… _Lyra_. Without another heartbeat’s hesitation, Serafina Pekkala brings to her bow the arrow she has sworn will find its mark in Mrs Coulter’s throat. She does not miss—

* * *

 

_The chance exists only for an instant, but in that instant, existence screams._

* * *

 

Hester remembers the flower too late, and Lee calls to Serafina Pekkala with the last of his strength. He does not die alone; he is never alone, so long as Hester is with him, and she vanishes only as his heartbeat fails. Serafina feels his call and knows as soon as she sees the gulch that her friend has died a hero’s death. She gives him what peace she can bestow as the worlds gather for war, and lets the winds of her own world embrace her once more.

* * *

 

_It is the only possibility that does not end in darkness, and as the others collapse, light flickers in relief._

* * *

 

 _How many people get to say they fell in battle twice,_ Lee almost quips to Hester, before remembering again that she is no longer there. Still, he can almost hear her response, as if carried on the shrieking wind: _we’re a-helping Lyra_. And because of Lyra, he knows he will be with Hester again soon. So he throws himself into battle and into the search, battering the Spectres of Indifference with every last scrap of consciousness and determination and passion left to him. He and John Parry and the other ghosts of soldiers make their way through the forces of heaven and earth, searching for two lost souls, fighting off those that seek to consume them.

There are witches in the skies, and he hurls a Spectre away from one who looks like Serafina. He only sees her face for an instant, in an expression of shocked relief, and he cannot spare the focus or the time to look back and be certain. There in front of him are two wildcats, surrounded by encircling Spectres, and around him every gust of wind and blade of grass threatens – promises? – to pull him apart.

He hopes that, if it is not her, it is one of her sisters who can carry word to her that he did not die in vain. That he holds no grudge, that she did not fail him. For if he had not died, he would not be here on this storm-battered plain, carrying out the greatest task in all his life or after.

* * *

 

 _When the chaos of battle clears, and we can see once more beyond the flickering brightness of too many possibilities flickering too quickly even for our awareness, a small red flower blooms on a plain none but we shall ever see again._  


End file.
